Liore is on vacation, but blogging never sleeps! Or, um, something like that. Today’s post is by Murf from the blog Murf Versus. ——————————– For the first five minutes of my MMORPG career, I was stuck in the new player tutorial that Origin had added in their Renaissance expansion for Ultima Online. Once I had arrived amongst the adventurers of the realm, I knew...

Yesterday this blog post “about the liberating and energizing effects of complete commercial failure” made the rounds on Twitter. The very indie studio behind critical successes Tale of Tales, Sunset, and more are shutting their doors and getting out of the game industry. The post outlines some of the ways that the developers didn’t succeed, but at the end of the day it simply seems that in the current market players...

I haven’t written much here about WoW’s flying drama, although we did talk about it on the podcast. You probably already know all about it but here’s a very short summary: A few weeks ago Watcher mentioned in an interview that flying would not be coming to Warlords of Draenor or any future content. WoW players flipped out. This week Blizzard announced in a blog post that flying will be coming back, but it’s...

Carbine Studios announced today that WildStar is going free-to-play, and I just don’t how I feel about it. On the one hand WS is a legitimately great game that never really found its audience, probably because technically they stopped playing hardcore MMOs around 2009. If WildStar had launched at the same time as RIFT I think it would have been very successful. The game has a lot of charm, some cool mechanics, and a housing...

This week Blizzard debuted their new “WoW Token”, allowing players to purchase months of subscription time with in-game gold. I haven’t put a lot of thought into the theorycraft behind the Token so I’ll leave that to others who have but I can confirm that it alllllmost got me back into Azeroth. (By the way, “WoW Token” just further cements my view that for all of their creative talents Blizzard is...

While I’m still having a grand time in Final Fantasy 14, lately I’ve been reminiscing about the glory days of RIFT. Before Storm Legion and before cash shops, RIFT was my favorite MMO ever. It didn’t start out that way: the game debuted with a weird anti-WoW advertising campaign that was kind of off-putting at the time, and it did a lot of patching and maturing over its first six months. But I maintain to this day...